The present disclosure relates to underwater communications, and more specifically, to techniques for providing secure and disruption-tolerant network underwater communications.
Despite covering 70% of the earths' surface, little is known about the subsea environment. The environment's nearly-impermeable communication medium and substantial pressures make accessing subsea information a daunting challenge. Nonetheless, subsea acoustic communication systems could soon be used to provide widespread information about the subsea environment. However, conventional solutions do not allow for secure and reliable network communications for underwater vehicles. For instance, while communication protocols like TCP/IP can provide reliable and secure network communications in some situations, these techniques are frequently ill-suited for underwater communications. As an example, communication systems such as TCP/IP require all hops within a point-to-point communications link to be active simultaneously, whereas hops for an underwater communication system may frequently experience intermittent connectivity.
Moreover, significantly delayed and disrupted data transmissions are common within many environments such as communications for underwater vehicles. In these environments, data being transmitted from a data source to a destination is further delayed when prior external communications (e.g., an exchange of cryptography keys) are required before successful transmission of the data. As conventional techniques for cryptography key distribution typically require at least one communication before the source can securely transmit data to a destination, these techniques may not be suitable for underwater communication networks where access to data transmissions is highly intermittent.